Why did my SSD "disappear" from my system?

A sudden power loss is a common cause for a system to fail to recognize an SSD, or not detect one it was previously able to. In most cases, your SSD can be returned to normal operating condition by completing a power cycle, a process that will take approximately one hour, followed by optimizing your power settings for SSD use.

We recommend you perform this procedure on a desktop computer because it allows you to only connect the SATA power connection, which improves the odds of the power cycle being successful. However, a USB enclosure with an external power source will also work. Apple and Windows desktop users follow the same steps.

1. Once you have the drive connected and sitting idle, simply power on the computer and wait for 20 minutes. We recommend that you don't use the computer during this process.

2. Power the computer down and disconnect the drive from the power connector for 30 seconds.

3. Reconnect the drive, and repeat steps 1 and 2 one more time.

4. Reconnect the drive normally, and boot the computer to your operating system.

5. If the latest firmware has not been updated to your drive, do so. You can find our firmware update pagehere.

A laptop computer will also work, but you’ll have to connect the drive and navigate to the system's BIOS menu. (Please refer to your system manufacturer’s documentation on how to access the BIOS.) Allowing the drive to sit in the BIOS will improve the odds that the power cycle will work. For laptops, we don’t recommended using a USB enclosure powered via USB. In addition, Apple users must hold the Option key while they power on the system (with the SSD installed). This will boot the Mac to the Startup Manager screen. The Startup Manager screen works like the BIOS screen on a laptop, in that it gives the drive power without any data throughput.

1. Laptop users will need to be in the BIOS menu, or Mac Startup Manager as stated above. The computer will need to stay powered for 20 minutes. We recommend you don’t use the laptop during this process.

2. Power the computer down and disconnect the drive for 30 seconds, by removing it from the drive bay. If you have an mSATA drive, remove it from the port.

3. Reconnect the drive, and repeat steps 1 and 2 one more time.

4. Reconnect the drive normally, and boot the computer to your operating system.

5. If the latest firmware is has not been updated to your drive, do so. Click here for our firmware updates.

My 512GB m4 SSD was disconnecting once an hour and it turned out to be a bug in the early m4 firmware. A firmware update fixed it. Too bad it was the last thing I tried. IMHO, if you have an m4 SSD that's about 4-5 months old that disconnects a lot, try the firmware update first.

Note there is a bug in the 000F m4 firmware that causes constant beachballs on Macs. If you have a Mac, then use firmware 0309 or else whatever is released after 000F.

The suggested fix did not work for my M4 512GB, firmware 000F, it remains bricked after less than 200 hours of use. Very annoying - I'm on a business trip with my laptop right now and have no way to replace the drive and install it from scratch until I return.

Any more suggestions to things I might try?

Also, I'm interested why the proposed procedure should do anything in the first place. Is there some magic in the drive logic that attempts a repair when its powered on but not accessed for 20 minutes?

I installed my M4 yesterday. I restarted my desktop a few times because of installation processes, and turned it off when I wasn't home.

Today when I restarted it after installing sound driver it said I had to choose a proper Boot device. For some reason my M4 is not being recognized.

I tried this solution but it didnt work for me... I don't know if I did right, because this is the only SSD with windows installed, my other HDD500GB is acting as a secondary... So I left it on the "select proper Boot device" for the 20 minutes, is that right?

The boot device selection screen works just as well as booting into BIOS, so yes, leaving your computer on that screen should have worked.

If you did that twice for 20 minutes, and disconnected the SSD for at least 30 seconds after each 20 minute strech, and the SSD still is not recognized, I would recommend that you contact Customer Service for your region, for more indepth troubleshooting.

My 64G M4 disappeared last week. I've gone through several power cycles with disconnections, it is still not seen by my BIOS. However, when I purchased it I got the kit with USB connector and transfer software. I installed a new SSD, loaded W7, then connected the M4 via USB cable. The EZGIG software can see my drive (asked me to format it, I declined for now). It appears the drive is functional via USB I reconnected the drive to a known good SATA connector and power cable, the BIOS is still not seeing the drive. I would really like to get this thing working in order to get my configured OS and programs back and save the headache of configuring a new system.

If your computer sees the drive when you connect it with the SATA-to-USB cable, then this power cycle process may not change the situation you have with your SSD. I would suggest that you contact Technical Support for your region at this point. They can assist you with further troubleshooting, and if necessary they would also be able to help with an RMA.

I have used a 60 Gb Crucial M4 as my boot drive in one PC for about a year, and I had never encountered the problem described above until a couple of days ago when a driver barfed, and I had to shutdown my PC. After this occurred, the Crucial SSD would disappear about 5-15 minutes after startup. If you restart your PC, the drive still won't reappear - the PC has to be cold-booted (powered down and restarted) for the drive to appear. I tried the power on/off procedure above several times, but it resolved nothing. Fortunately, I just downloaded the Rev H software and updated the firmware. After a few reboots, the problem appears to be resolved. Hooray! Good luck to those of you who still have the problem.

This was the main drive in my laptop, and I was so freaked out it disappeared! I was using my laptop when the whole thing hard locked in Windows 7. I poked at it a bit, but eventually had to hold down the power button to force it off. Then on the reboot, the BIOS complained there was no hard drive!

I forget how I found this page, but I have a Thermaltake BlacX5G USB3 to SATA adapter, which has AC power, so I used that to power the drive (leaving the USB completely unplugged). And for the 30 seconds unplugged, I removed it completely from the adapter.

After the second 20 minutes, I pulled the drive, waited 30 seconds, then plugged the drive back in and plugged the USB into another computer, hoping it would mount at that point, but it never did. I was crestfallen, but I put the SSD back into the laptop, thinking I'd follow the instructions regarding waiting in the BIOS, but when I turned on the laptop, it found the drive, and boot back into Windows!!!

I immediately backed up the important files, and am now looking into determining the firmware (and presumably updating it to the latest).

We do not have a customer service center located in Taiwan, but you are welcome to contact our US Customer Service. They will be happy to assist with troubleshooting, and if you need to do an RMA, they would handle that for you as well. Be sure to let them know what troubleshooting steps you have already taken on your own, to make it easier for them to assist you.

Same problem as everyone else…. M4 worked great for 18 months and then gave up the ghost. I took it out of my Dell E6230 and hooked the drive up to the Crucial USB transfer cable I used to copy my hard drive to the SSD during initial installation. I then plugged the USB end into a standard USB (phone) charger. I did two cycles of the power on for 20 minutes and power off for 30 seconds (or so) by disconnecting the USB charger and then put the SSD back into the Dell and it worked good as new. I have also modified the power plan for the Windows 8 system to keep power to the drive at all times. Check back with me in another 18 months…

I just recently swapped out my M4 for a new MX100. I shut down the system, unplugged the M4, installed the MX100 and installed Windows 8.1, then plugged in the M4 to get my data off it. Nothing. System wouldn't recognize it. I have tried everything and the REALLY frustrating part is that I unplugged the drive EXACTLY 3 years to the day of purchase (September 27th, 2011). They won't cover the three year warranty even though I tried to submit an RMA on Saturday the 27th. Arghhhh !!!

Hi John. We are really sorry for the issues that you have experienced with your drive. Even if the warranty has expired we still offer free tech support. Please call us directly and we would be happy to see if there is any troubleshooting we can attempt. Our number is 1-800-336-8915. I am sorry for the inconvenience.

All I can say is no fargin way. Tried just about every trick in my book. Even tried the baking thing as stupid as it sounds - hey, I was desparate. Then, I followed the instructions here and, voila. SSD saved. These instructions sound like total BS, but it worked like a charm for me. Thank you Crucial.

I tried to power cycle 5 times (connect/reconnect as per crucial's instruction) on three laptops (one has core duo CPU) but to no avail. I even tried to power cycle 5 times via a usb to sata power cable.

Nothing works. Did I do the power cycle correctly? Could please you post a video to show what is the correct way to power cycle?

I am getting a Mac mini soon. Would a Mac be able to recognize mx100 more easily? Please help

hi to all, im Bruno from Argentina and i have a Crucial M500 240gb since march 2014...

since i have the ssd, i guess 4 or 5 times the system freezes, and restart... after restart the ssd was not detected anymore... reconnecting sata and power cables a few times bring the ssd back to be detected... the last time i had this isssue was yesterday, after that i decide to contact crucial support to prevent this happening again... i explain to this nice agent my problem, and told me to do a power cycle and then update the firmware...

ok, i did the power cycle, and then it wasnt able anymore to start windows... after the first screen (the one who describe the computer processor, ram, etc) it says "loading operating system"... and restart.... over and over again.... the crucial was detected in the first creen, but it dont start windows...

i try to reinstall windows, with the dvd... but i wasnt able to do it...

i connect an hdd with windows as master drive, then the ssd as a slave ( changing bios settings to have the hdd as primary boot drive) it take 10 minutes to pass trough STARTING WINDOWS screen.... then i could see the ssd in "my computer" but cant acces him... and in the disk manager it shows the 100mb partition for windows as RAW, and the rest 2xxGb as BASIC... i try to format, delete, etc, and no response....

so thats my issue... i just chat with another agent that told me to make an ACTIVE GARBAGE COLECTION, so i have to wait 8hs to see if the problem is solved or not...

meanwhile any advise its well recived =)

**bleep**: sorry for my english, i hope i can make all understand me...

I have one Crucial m4 32GB mSATA Internal Solid State Drive CT032M4SSD3, purchesed on amazon on 11/15/2013 instaled on my Intel NUC.

This week I got this message: A bootable device has not been detected.

My ssd disapper from my BIOS and I find this article and try 2 times power cycle my ssd, but with no luck. I use the notebook process on my Intel NUC.

If I remove power cord from my NUC my sdd reaper in BIOS and my OS start with no problems, but if I reboot or shutdown, my sdd again disapper from my BIOS. The only way to ssd work is remove my power cord, wait for 5 seconds, replug, and power on my nuc, but this is very annoying.

It sounds as if the issues are related to power management of the SSD port. If that is the case, you will want to look at the power savings options in your BIOS. Make sure they are set to not power off the drive during idle times, in other words, you want the SSD to have full power at all times. You may also want to check and make sure that you have the latest BIOS on your NUC.

If you are still running into difficulties after making the changes to your power management settings, please contact Technical Support directly for more in-depth troubleshooting.

Hi, MY Crucial SSD Died some time back, ( Model 256GB m4 ssd 2.5) , i have tried all the above options, but not able to get it working, One thing i would like to point out is, when connected to PC thru Powered USB, i can see the partition , but not able to access , once i could see the folders inside the drive. But now, it shows as RAW drive only.

I just want to share my story wicht started with similar symptom: an ssd (evo850) just disappeared on my laptop (ux32l) and after reboot I was kept getting into bios, where I had no boot devices. I remove this ssd from the laptop and put it into an external box for hdd and it worked just fine through usb. So the problem was not with the ssd and I put it back into the laptop. But still bios didn't show it in the boot tab.

So I decided to boot from some usb flash with Windows installation on it. It worked and installation started from flash, but since I didn't want to reinstall my system, I rebooted the laptop and removed this usb flash, and a miracle happened, the laptop booted from ssd and keeps working ever since. And that's it my happy ending story

The drive in my daughters computer mysteriously disappeared yesterday, I followed this guide with the drive in the PC, but still the drive did not work. Last night I'd left it plugged into my USB drive caddy, turned my PC on tonight and the drive just appeared. So I quickly backed it up, then put it back in the original PC and it booted just fine. I checked the firmware and it was quite an old version 01G or something like that so I updated it. Hopefully now it will be fine.

I am now having the same problem as everyone else. I've tried the powering up and down option but still not finding it. I am going to buy a drive usb adapter and see if my computer can find it that way. I would not recommend crucial again after this because it appears to be a common problem with the M4 model and what crucial as a company should have done was a replacement option or provided a free service for a Best Buy to have to go through the trouble of fixing it. The panic of losing your entire computer due to a faulty drive is the worse feeling a user could go through. Very unhappy.

Fixed !! I just had a 120 gig M500 drive not be recognized on HP Pavillion DV7 laptop after power outage from a storm, I rebooted couple times and no luck, drive was not being recognized, came here and read previous comments and tried again doing reboot but this time i unplugged ac power cord and unplugged battery for about a minute first, then i left ac power unplugged and rebooted and went into bios by hitting esc key on bootup and bios saw the drive, i then had bios do a error check on drive and all went ok, so i saved bios results and rebooted again only on battery power , no ac plugged in , and win 10 saw the drive !! All good, i did a fresh backup of drive in case this acts up again and it backed up with no errors. I then plugged ac power cord back in and still good. First time this has ever happened and i have 4 ss drives in 2 machines. Hope this helps.